Just Host Hosting Review

Just Host prides themselves on their wide appeal to any and all looking for a great hosting solution. Owned by EIG, Just Host represents the individual and small business end of the company, narrowly focusing on those niche markets.

With a core focus on small businesses and individuals, Just Host has one of the least expensive shared hosting programs out there at $2.95 p/mo. They focus almost exclusively on individuals and small businesses, and their shared hosting programs reflect that focus. They include a free site builder (Trendy) as well as 1-click installs for:

Concrete5

Drupal

Joomla

Magento

osCommerce

TomatoCart

WordPress

They also support a huge range of other application for both ecommerce, blogging, and forums, which means that most of their core audience is going to be taken care of.

Their basic plan includes 100GB space with unlimited bandwidth, but doesn’t include global CDN. For that, you’ll need the next tier up which for $4.85 p/mo gets you unlimited everything including websites, domains, and email accounts, as well as some spam prevention. Their top tier option includes more advertising credits (they all come with some) a lifetime domain registration, and an SSL certificate.

With regards to MySQL, their starter package comes with 1,000 data tables and 20 databases, whereas both pricier plans come with up to 3,000 data tables and unlimited databases.

VPS and dedicated hosting

While Just Host clearly focuses on shared hosting options, they do in fact offer VPS and dedicated hosting packages. Their VPS starts at $29.99 per month which gets you:

Dual cores

2.2Ghz

2GB of RAM

30GB SAN storage

1TB bandwidth

These naturally increase all the way up to $119.99 p/mo for the Ultimate package, with quad cores, 8GB RAM, 240GB SAN storage, and 4TB bandwidth.

Their dedicated servers are built on the scalable cloud OS OpenStack, are fully automated with instant provision, and promise to be up and running in under 5 minutes. You can manage them via cPanel and they install WHM for you to get you going . Starting at $149.99 p/mo, each CPU has 2.3 GHz, 2 cores, 4 threads, and a 3MB cache, with 4GB RAM, RAID level 1 storage (1,000GB) and 5TB bandwidth.

Their premium package offers simply more of the same, with more storage and more computing power for $249.99.

MySQL

Just Host offers its users MySQL and PostgreSQL databases to use, to be manipulated with phpMyAdmin, phpPgAdmin, or SSH. They use MySQL 5.5 and PostgreSQL 8.1.11, putting them a few versions behind some of their competition. They do store their web files and their databases on different disks though, which improves the stability of the system overall and reduces the probability of failure.

However, while they do have a large knowledge base, they unfortunately do not offer any video tutorials to troubleshoot database problems. They also don’t support any query caching, meaning that your databases will likely run significantly slower than if you hosted with a competitor, despite the high level of control afforded to you.

Technical details

PHP 5 and support for custom PHP.INI files

Perl 5

Python

Ruby on Rails

MySQL 5 and PostgreSQL 8

MySQL and PostgreSQL servers

Javascript, Flash, DHTML, and Shockwave support

Linux based OS

Server Side Includes

Conclusion

Just Host is fantastic for the small businesses and individuals they target. They’re entirely focused on getting a low cost product out the door and getting their customers up and running on the web as quickly as possible. However, the flipside of that is that their offering, especially their approach to SQL databases, is a little less robust than other companies. If you’re determined to have the best, and you’ve got the technical skills to tweak a database to your needs, then competitors might be a better fit for you.